Rupert Thomson and Maggie Gee set for Edinburgh Book Festival appearance

Author of This Party’s Got to Stop

With This Party’s Got to Stop, the author of Death of a Murderer and Divided Kingdom has penned a darkly humorous account of how he and his brothers returned to their Eastbourne family home for seven months after their father passed away in 1984. This occurred two decades after their mother collapsed and died on a nearby tennis court. While Rupert and his middle brother Robin tried to get high on their father’s medication, youngest brother Ralph and his wife Vivian fixed a lock to their bedroom door, with relations breaking down to the extent that Rupert and Ralph didn’t speak to each other for 23 years. Thomson is joined in this event by Maggie Gee, whose own memoir is a portrait of post-war English family life featuring sex, death and duty.

In Rupert Thomson’s memoir This Party’s Got to Stop, the author of Soft! and Divided Kingdom writes memorably of returning to the family home after the death of his father. As the siblings come to terms with their conflicting emotions, old tensions and turbulences rise to the surface. Maggie Gee’s My Animal Life is an…